Francis M. Nevins, who wrote the introduction to this edition of Night Has a Thousand Eyes, notes that a fragment left behind in his papers after the author's death "explained why he wrote as he did." Woolrich wrote that

"I was only trying to cheat death...I was only trying to surmount for a little while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and obliterate me."

As early as age eleven, he began to understand that death was unavoidable, noting that he had a "trapped feeling,

like some sort of a poor insect that you've put inside a downturned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can't and it can't, and it can't."

Nevins also reveals that Woolrich was "haunted by a sense of doom that never left him." For me, Night Has a Thousand Eyes most keenly conveys the author's angst regarding that inevitable "darkness," his "sense of doom," and his attempt through his writing to "cheat death," given that an obsession with death and an attempt to outmaneuver fate are key elements of this story.

There is a short stretch at the beginning where the reader has no idea what he or she is about to be plunged into, since the story begins so normally after young detective Tom Shawn finishes his shift at the homicide department:

"Every night he walked along the river, going home. Every night about one."

It is his time to dream, to whistle, to look at the stars, all things he couldn't do in a bus. His routine sets him apart from his bus-riding colleagues; it's just a "minor defect," but it's what he does. Tonight starts out as a "night like many others," but as he learns all too quickly,

"Anything you keep doing like that, if you keep on doing it long enough, suddenly one time something happens. Something that counts, something that matters, something that changes the whole rest of your life. And you forget all the other times that went before it, and just remember that once."

Tom's life is about to change, and it starts with the discovery of a five-dollar bill at his feet. The owner of the money and the purse Tom eventually finds is Jean Reid, who is on the verge of committing suicide. He stops her, and in an all-night diner, she relates to him a bizarre story that begins with her father's business trip to San Francisco and ends with her father in a paralyzing state of trauma stemming from fear. From there, Tom takes it upon himself to help Jean and her father, enlisting the help of his fellow detectives in an attempt to bring down what he believes is a con man preying on the Reids. It seems that every prediction this man has made about the Reids has come true so far, so when death on a set date is next in the cards, Mr. Reid just folds.

The book carries with it, as Jonathan Latimer wrote about his hopes for the film of the same name, "a real sense of terror that these things were coming true." Woolrich does a beautiful job of making that sense of terror palpable, and in Mr. Reid, he gives us a character who is not only petrified of his own death, but one who begins to feel that he's completely lost any control over his destiny. Reid, a successful businessman, is obviously someone used to calling the shots and taking the reins of his business to get where he is socially and economically. However, as each prediction becomes reality, he seems to become increasingly aware that he is no longer in control, and that whatever power he thought he had offers him nothing in the face of the fate that he believes has been mapped out for him. Being forewarned does not mean forearmed in this case, since it brings with it "a curious sort of clammy terror," a "nightmare feeling."

There's much more going on here underneath but I'll leave that for other readers to discover.

Beware -- there is nothing happy going on here; then again it's noir so that should come as no surprise. Where this book goes is captured by Francis Nevins in the introduction, where he acutely describes what's found in this novel as

"the kind of waking nightmare that lies at the heart of noir..."

and really, what could be more nightmarish than the idea that there is no escape?

Saturday, January 19, 2019

When I opened the envelope and saw this book, my first thought was "who the hell is Jean Potts?" while my second thought was "Cool! Another woman writer I've never heard of!" Rather than relegate it to the this-can-wait-a-while stack, I threw it into the suitcase to take with me on my second trip west last week.

As to my first reaction, Jean Potts was born in 1910 in Saint Paul Nebraska, and after graduating from Nebraska Wesleyan University, she went on to work for The Phonograph newspaper in her home town before moving to New York. Her first crime novel, Go Lovely Rose, published in 1954, won her an Edgar Award; she would go on to write thirteen more crime novels before her death in 1999, the last of which, My Brother's Killer, was written in 1975. She also wrote

"several short stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Magazine and Women's Day to name a few."

But who she is as a writer is much more interesting, and it didn't take me long to discover what makes these books work so very well for me personally. In her New York Times Obituary, Edward D. Hoch (former president of the Mystery Writers of America) notes that perhaps her "strongest suit" was her characterizations, and I have to say that this is what I discovered in these books. What hit me right away and continued to stay with me is how very flawed her characters are, and how they remain in many cases so locked inside of their own heads that for some of them, there is little chance of escape. After finishing this two-in-one volume, I then turned to the introduction written by J.F. Norris where he says it so much more eloquently, noting that in Potts' stories, "Thoughts imprison her characters," to which I said out loud, "Yes, that's it. Spot on."

As someone who normally reads less for plot than for what an author has to say about the human psyche and human nature in general, I always have an inner eye open to how (or if) an author incorporates an exploration into (quoting Norris again), the "dark recesses of human imagination and its powerful hold." Potts is deadly serious in this arena, and it begins to show not even five minutes into her first novel, Go Lovely Rose. Neither of these books are in any shape or form what I'd call traditional whodunit or mystery stories -- in both, I think it is safe and accurate to say that Potts' genius as a writer is revealed via the slow unfolding of these dark edges that reside within the minds of her characters. Along with a very keen, often delectable sense of irony in her writing, it's certainly enough to make me want to read more of her work.

Because I can't even begin to convey the psychological depths at work in either of these stories, I'll just offer a bit of basic appetite-whetting plot here with no spoilers.

Go Lovely Rose begins with the death of Mrs. Rose Henshaw,

"Fifty-six years of age ... For nineteen years housekeeper in the home of the late Dr. G.F. Buckmaster..."

who had fallen down the steps to the basement of the Buckmaster home in Coreyville and had broken her neck. Rachel Buckmaster, who had left the family home for Chicago, returns home to sell the house so that her younger brother Hartley (19) can pay for college with his share; she's also disturbed after speaking to her brother and to a neighbor who tells her that Mrs. Henshaw's death was an accident, but that "people were talking." There aren't many people in Coreyville who would actually mourn the loss of the Buckmaster's long-term housekeeper; she was an "evil" woman, even according to her ex-husband, and Rachel realizes that Hartley is "free now, with Mrs. Henshaw dead." Things may have worked out just fine for all had it not been for the appearance of Mrs. Henshaw's sister Mrs. Pierce, who insists that Rose was murdered and raises such a stink that Hartley is arrested. Rachel and the local physician Dr. Craig, along with Hartley's girlfriend Bix Bovard and her father, newspaper editor Hugh Bovard, join together to prove Hartley is innocent, which isn't going to be easy for several reasons. Trust me, this is not just another murder mystery.

Moving from small midwest townville to New York City for The Evil Wish (1963), Potts brings us the story of two sisters who since childhood have grown up eavesdropping on their domineering father from the basement, and continuing the tradition into adulthood, one day discover that their dad has plans that would basically disinherit them in favor of his current girlfriend. If Lucy and Marcia Knapp don't like it, he says, they can lump it. The thought of losing their home is devastating, and Lucy can't stand the idea of being "abandoned" by her sister. Even worse, they discover that they "don't matter to him" and that "he simply doesn't care." They are savvy enough, however, to know that they have to keep the lid on the fact that they know what's about to happen; they are also irate enough to decide to kill him. Fate steps in however, when a car crash does the job, and while their problem has seemingly disappeared, they are left with the "evil wish" of his death, which as the epigraph by Hesiod reveals, is "most evil to the wisher." As the blurb for this book asks, "what are they to do with their murder scheme and the residual guilt...," but really, reading this book as a story about a case of guilty consciences doesn't at all do it justice, because it's much, much more. To her credit, Potts provides a hell of an answer to the question with ratcheting tension doled out in increments along the way toward some pretty horrific consequences.

It is a true pity (she says once more in a familiar lament) that the work of Jean Potts is not more well known. She would be very much enjoyed by readers who enjoy the work of her contemporary Margaret Millar, who also wrote some psychologically-oriented novels, so hopefully the word will get out. She may never become a household name, but she is definitely a writer whose work deserves the attention of not only serious aficionados of crime fiction of yesteryear, but also of readers like myself on the lookout for relatively unknown women writers of the genre. My thanks to J.F. Norris for his insight into this writer in his introduction, and especially to the lovely people at Stark House for sending me a copy of this book. I'm just blown away.

Friday, January 18, 2019

9781786074317
Point Blank/ Oneworld
(available February 2019 in the US)
400 pp

advanced reader copy (my thanks to the publishers!!)

The Syndicate is the second installment in Guy Bolton's series that begins with The Pictures, that (as the blurb says) centers around main character Jonathan Craine,

"a detective at LAPD who has spent his entire career as a studio 'fixer,' covering up crimes of the studio players to protect the billion-dollar industry that built Los Angeles."

I haven't read that book, but evidently things got pretty bad for Craine in the city of Angels, and he is now living on a farm in Bridgeport. It's 1947, and Craine reflects at the beginning on "all the changes that had happened" in the meantime -- leaving LAPD, moving away from the city, raising a son without his wife, the war "and all the death that had come to the world." Happy in his solitude, he's about to find his peace shattered by a murder in the city he'd left behind. His help is needed to find the killer, but the people who want it aren't asking: if he doesn't fall in with the plan, he risks losing not only his own life, but more importantly, that of his son. Faced with no choice in the matter, Craine makes his way first to Las Vegas to meet with the mob, and then back to his old stomping grounds and his past. We're not talking about just any murder here -- the corpse belongs to mobster Bugsy Siegel, and it will be Craine's job to find out who did him in. Let's just put it this way: his is not an easy task: he has just five days, and his only help is an older hit man who is sent to Los Angeles with him. He figures out early on that he's going to need much more if he wants to save his son, and targets an ambitious crime reporter, Tilda Conroy, from The Examiner as an asset.

While this sort of book falls out of my range of normal reading fare (I'm generally a quieter, gentler reader not prone to violent stories and I'm not a fan of real-life people as fictional characters, preferring thinly-disguised replicas), the author has done so many things right here that I found myself enjoying it. He not only made Craine's story a compelling read, but he moved it in unexpected directions -- it could have been a straight sweep completely focused on solving the murder itself, but it turns out that there's much more going on here: a peek at the darker story behind the growth of Las Vegas into what it eventually became, the Red Scare in Hollywood, the blatant racism in the city (and the US) of the era, and the abuses of power by those whose job it is to protect not only the citizens of Los Angeles, but the citizens of the United States as well. And while there's enough happening to satisfy some readers' needs for fast-paced action, Mr. Bolton never lets his audience forget how high the stakes are for Craine, who often turns inward to examine not only his current situation but also his past. Finally, I have to say that I was highy impressed after reading a most interesting article at Shotsmag about how the author came up with the character of Tilda Conroy, drawing on two real women reporters, Florabel Muir and Agness Underwood, who worked on the Black Dahlia murder and the murder of Bugsy Siegel, "two of the biggest stories of 1947..." Kudos for that move, Mr. Bolton; it's nice to see women who might have otherwise been relegated to the back pages of history given their due both as an acknowledgment and in the form of one of the strongest characters in the novel.

The Syndicate isn't officially out until February (which is really just around the corner), but I see that early readers are already giving this novel very high marks. It was much less about solving the crime for me than the factors I've already mentioned that gave me the most satisfaction (although really, I didn't see that ending coming, a definite plus); when an author can get as deeply into such a flawed character's psyche as Mr. Bolton has done here, well, let's just put it this way: anyone can write a murder mystery, but making it as psychologically intense as the author's done here is a job well done.

While I've been reading steadily over the last 3 weeks or so, time has not been my friend as far as posting goes. First, it was off to Seattle for a week starting the 24th of December,

from fly4free.com (I'm not endorsing this website; it just had the right image)

then, one week after that, and still suffering a severe case of west coast body clock syndrome (WCBCS), we made our way to Los Angeles for a week of catching up with friends and family,

from fly4free.com (again, not an endorsement) -- and yes, I know the map shows San Diego, but whatever.

arriving home this past Tuesday, with a bad cold and a fresh case of WCBCS to add to my previous woes.

logo from Medium.com

fLooking at the bigger picture that is 2019, I'll be making my way through mysteries and crime fiction from roughly 1919 through 1930, with a focus on more obscure titles, although since we're moving into the golden age here, there will probably be quite a few which are recognizable by readers familiar with that period. As usual, I'll throw in some contemporary titles here and there, and then it's just what ever happens to be on the shelves to balance things out in my crime-reading universe. And that could be pretty much anything, so stay tuned.

Friday, December 14, 2018

With one of the best opening scenes I've come across in my reading lately, I knew that this book and I were going to get along just fine. The House on Vesper Sands is a good mix of historical crime fiction and Victorian sensation fiction with more than a slight supernatural edge -- in short, it hit all of my relax-time, escape reading buttons. I read like I do everything else, wholeheartedly, giving the book in front of me my undivided attention, but sometimes I just need a brain break, and this one fit the bill completely. Unfortunately, US readers will have to do what I did and order it from elsewhere (in my case Book Depository), since it doesn't seem to be available here except through sellers in the UK or Ireland.

Set in England of the 1890s, the novel begins one snowy night as Esther Tull arrives at a house in Half-Moon street, where she is employed by Lord Strythe as a seamstress. The first clue we have that this is no ordinary job is that she is locked in to the room where she sews, with the butler, Carew, stationed outside in the hallway reading The Illustrated London News. The second clue that something is not right is the fact that once inside, she proceeds carefully and most quietly to break into a strongbox and remove three crystal bottles that she puts inside a satchel before dropping them off a window ledge onto the ground below. It is all part of a "promise" she'd made and she "meant to keep it." Finally, as the book blurb reveals, she climbs onto the ledge, and jumps. When the police arrive to investigate, they find a strange message "embroidered on her body" (not a spoiler - it's on the dustjacket blurb).

A case of mistaken identity puts young Gideon Bliss on the case along with Inspector Cutter of the Metropolitan Police, and together they work to solve not only this case, but the case of a missing young woman as well. At the same time, society columnist Octavia Hillingdon is looking for a good story outside of the social world, and the two threads link up as she hears an incredible story about a still-open case involving the death of yet another young woman. In the meantime the newspapers are captivating readers with their headlines about "the Spiriters," who have once again cast "a pall of fear over Whitechapel and surrounding districts."

That's more than enough about plot; to say more would just be a shame, since I think it's probably fair to say that this book revolves around plot much more than it does its characters. Once I started reading I realized that some of these characters seemed familiar, albeit from other books I've read, but at the same time, there's something different going on here with these people. There's great interplay between Inspector Cutter and Gideon Bliss, for example, that provides a lot of humor that sort of balances out the more disturbing aspects of the novel. And while the supernatural edge of this mystery might bother some people, one of the main ideas so nicely presented in this book is that "men don't need magic to do evil," as Mr. O'Donnell clearly shows, which also provides a more serious side to the story.

The House on Vesper Sands is pure entertainment, and one that its author must have had a great deal of fun writing. Every now and then reading for fun is a great thing, and I'm happy to have spent time with this story. Recommended for lighter mystery readers who don't mind a bit o' the strange in their stories. Now I think I have to go pick up his Maker of Swans to see what I've missed. Relax, have fun, and enjoy the ride.

Thursday, December 13, 2018

From different sides of the Atlantic come two very different stories involving two very different women. The first of these is Miss Ferriby's Clients, written by a highly prolific Florence Warden (neé Florence Alice Price) whose biography remains somewhat elusive. There's a bit about her at Furrowed Middlebrowwhich notes that she was a

"Playwright, actress, and author of more than 150 novels which, .... 'specialized in courtship and marital dilemmas.' She once bragged that she wrote more than a million words a year, and she routinely published 2 -4 books per year throught her career."

"was born in Hanworth as the daughter of a stockbroker. She was educated in Brighton and in France... In 1887 she married Edward George James. She wrote many more novels, but ... she received little money from her work and her financial situation became more difficult."

Young Welton Keynes and his brother Basil had been brought up enjoying "every luxury" until the day that their father "found himself one morning a ruined man." While nobody actually knew what had happened to dad, it was believed that he'd offed himself while crossing from Dover from Ostend on a boat. Basil was 18, and while he was supposed to have been on his way to Cambridge just after leaving Eton, he had to get a job as a bank clerk, while Welton, 24, found the job market tough. Three weeks of looking brought nothing until one day he saw an advertisement for a secretary:

Off to Chiswick he goes, where he gets directions to the elderly lady's home from a younger woman who a bit later talks young Walton into walking to her home, where her mother dishes out the dirt on Miss Ferriby. She lets him know that "Miss Ferriby changes secretaries very often, and ... and nobody seems to know what becomes of them." Mind you, this should have been Welton's clue to walk completely away from this job, but everything changes when he rescues an old woman "most opportunely" from an attack. This second strange happening in the neighborhood makes him even more curious, and he returns to Miss Ferriby's residence the next day where he was "not in the least surprised" to find that the woman he'd rescue was Miss Ferriby herself. He gets the job, but it doesn't take long for him to wish he hadn't.

What's notable here isn't so much the mystery itself, but rather how the main criminal is portrayed. It's not a spoiler to let on that Miss Ferriby isn't the nicest of elderly women (in fact, she is one of the most brutal women villains in fiction of this era that I've read so far), and the first thing we learn about her is that she is "deformed and stunted," with an "enormous head." She has "features large enough for those of a man." Her main "deformity", a "hunchback," is mentioned 21 times throughout the novel, and in describing this book, the publishers have noted that often "the main villain" in books of this era (as was the case in the Victorian era as well) was "physically disabled or disfigured ... to make him or her appear more villainous." There are more than a few surprises in store for the reader of this novel, and seriously, by the time I finished it my head was spinning from all of the twists.

Next up is American author Jennette Lee's The Green Jacket. Jennette Lee (1860-1951) went to school at Smith, married in 1886, and then went back Smith in 1901 where she became an associate professor of English in 1904. Bob Schneider at Women Detectivesnotes that she left academia in 1913 to become a full-time writer, with 22 books published between 1900 and 1926, and that "less than 15% of her output seems to be in the mystery/detective genre." The Green Jacket is the first of a series of three novels to feature Miss Millicent Newberry, quite likely, as stated at Women Detectives, the first woman detective who actually owned her own detective agency. Newberry is also notable in that she feels that she ought to have say in what happens with the criminals she's caught. She doesn't believe that prison is always the right decision; as she tells her former mentor Tom Corbin, she "couldn't sleep nights, thinking of men in prison that never would have been there," if it hadn't been for her,

"Men that I knew weren't really bad -- drunk or mad or something!"

As she says, "I made up my mind that if I did the catching, I was going to have something to say about the punishment." Indeed, some of the visitors to her office are former offenders she's caught, including women, who come and check in on a regular schedule much as if she were a probation officer.

The Green Jacket begins as Tom Corbin tells Milly he wants to partner with her. Her business is highly successful, and typical male that he is, he talks about how they are made to "work together." As he says, Milly has the "good mind for details," but she needs him "to handle the case as a whole." He wants her to take on the case of the Mason emeralds, which he never solved when he was called in two years earlier "after some of the hardest work the office ever put in on anything." It all came back to him that very morning when he saw a clipping about the death of a woman Corbin's detectives had suspected in the case, and now he tells Milly that she'll "never solve the case." Milly needs time to think it over, changing her mind when a heavily-veiled woman walks into her office and asks her to take up the same case. It seems that Mrs. Oswald Mason had gotten Milly's name from her now dead adopted daughter (Corbin's suspect), and they make plans for Milly to stay at the Mason home in the guise of a seamstress so that Milly can make some headway on discovering who stole the jewels. The title refers to a piece of knitting that Milly works on as she works on the case. It seems that she has a habit of starting something new for every case that she keeps up as long as it takes her to come to a solution. She's also sort of a detective Madame Defarge -- reverse stitches in her work here and there are used as reminders of specific things she wants to remember.

I think it's just great that we have a woman writer creating an incredibly independent female detective whose business is going gangbusters, but if I never read another book by this author I'll be perfectly okay with that. First of all, I don't even see a point to this detective story, something anyone who reads this will completely understand when all is said and done, because really, the only thing that happens is that Milly's on hand at casa de Mason to act as a soundboard for everyone's problems. A few family secrets come out that have some sort of bearing on the theft of the emeralds, but when it comes right down to it, the whole story is just plain lackluster with much wringing of hands in the process. Second, the coincidence of Mrs. Mason walking into the Newberry Detective Agency just after Milly and Corbin have their little talk about that very same case he couldn't ever solve is just too much. And finally, really, this entire book could have been half of its size -- it made me so frustrated I just wanted to scream through most of it.

Truth be told, between these very independent women, I'll take the villain any time -- at least she was much more interesting than the crime solver. So it's definitely thumbs up for Miss Ferriby's Clients and a big thumbs down on The Green Jacket.

Monday, December 10, 2018

I would like to thank Henry at Crime Wave Press for my copy of this book. I didn't use it, because silly me, I failed to see the pdf file he'd included in the email he sent, so I bought a kindle version But thanks all the same.

"publishes a range of crime fiction -- from whodunits to Noir and Hardboiled, from historical mysteries to espionage thrillers, from literary crime to pulp fiction, from highly commercial page turners to marginal texts exploring the world's dark underbelly."

My first experience with this small indie press was, coincidentally, a book by the author of the book featured in today's post, Tom Vater. The title was The Devil's Road to Kathmandu, and it was a hell of a story that I remember not wanting to put down, so naturally I said yes when asked if I'd consider reading another one by the same writer. This time around the action takes place in Thailand, and The Monsoon Ghost Image is the end of a trio of books featuring Detective Maier after The Cambodian Book of the Dead and The Man With the Golden Mind.
Former war correspondent, after years in the field and the death of a friend from Cambodia, Maier no longer wants nothing at all to do with war. He now (2002) works in "Hamburg's most prestigious detective agency,"and as the story begins, his boss Sundermann hands him a strange case. It seems that he has had a call from an Emilie Ritter, a woman whose famous photo journalist husband Martin Ritter is missing, presumed dead, with a funeral scheduled for the following Tuesday in Berlin. Maier knows this already, but he gets a gut punch when Sundermann reveals that Ritter was seen in Bangkok just a couple of days earlier. Emilie shows Maier and his partner Mikhail an email from someone with the enigmatic name of the "Wicked Witch of the East" confirming that Ritter is not only still alive, but is also "involved in the crime of the century." Emilie needs to know whether Ritter is dead or alive, so Maier and Mikhail are off to Thailand to try and track him down. They're there a month with no sign either way, the calm before the storm after which all hell breaks loose, centering around "the world's most wanted photograph, the 21st century's Zapruder document."

As with most thriller novels, while reading The Monsoon Ghost Image on one level I'd advise a complete suspension of disbelief, as the story explodes into seriously crazy, over-the-top territory. Our detective friends find themselves caught up in some of the most bizarre situations imaginable (and I'm not joking here). The story outdarks dark -- there are at least two psychopaths whose actions will likely keep readers on the edges of their chairs, and knowing who to trust becomes downright impossible through the many twists and turns taken by this story. Having said that, let me also say that underneath this craziness runs an undeniable grain of truth -- in the war on terror, there are certain agencies that will go to any lengths to get results, all "authorized at the highest levels of the world's most open and egalitarian society." In the process, sometimes the line between good guys and bad guys becomes unrecognizable, and things get worse as they attempt a cover up in an effort to ensure that their dirty secrets will never be revealed. And then, of course, there are others who just want to exploit those secrets for their own gain -- in short, as someone notes in this book, "it's about money."

I am not normally a reader of thrillers, and while this one is, as I said, way over the top, I actually got caught up in it because I had to know what happened next. Each time I thought things couldn't get any worse, they did, and it was a hair-raising ride to the finish. It is not at all for the squeamish (I found myself reading quickly through some of the many gruesome scenes, the equivalent of covering my eyes while watching the same on television), and it is not for people who freak out over the use of profanity or violence. In the end though, what made this book work well for me was a) the focus on that underlying grain of truth mentioned above combined with the author's out-there imagination in telling that story (!) and b) the author's depiction of Maier as a man who through it all tries to retain his humanity while others lose theirs by the wayside. Throw in the exotic locations throughout Thailand and well, it becomes the stuff of a tv miniseries I would definitely watch.

I'd read anything written by Tom Vater -- his mind works in strange and mysterious ways, a quality I genuinely appreciate in the crime fiction universe.

What I've read this year in crime fiction and mystery, a split off of my regular reading journal

Hands down, crime fiction is my favorite genre. I am a wee bit picky, though, and I trend toward the darker side of crime. My focus in reading in this genre is to explore what makes people do what they do -- whether it's the bad guy or the good guy. I truly believe that the best crime fiction should explore human nature and how one's actions are determined by both outward and internal influences.

The crime segments is part of my overall online book journal -- it's neither a literary nor expert take on crime fiction/mysteries, but rather a way to keep a record of my reading as I explore different authors, different subgenres and currently works from obscure writers. Have fun and do feel free to comment!

About Me

bottom line: I love to read.
I use this space to record and to talk about what I've read during the year. You won't see descriptions like "lush, lyrical prose" here ... I'm just an ordinary reader person who wants to share a love of the written word. I don't really "review" -- that's for the pros. I just offer opinions. Feel free to comment any time.